Article excerpt

Residents from the surrounding streets don't even glance at the
more formal corner store with its cage-like security bars and
understocked shelves.

They make directly for Bell's Tuck Shop - as Mr. Serumula's store
is known.

"The spaza shops are part of the community so there is no
security problem," says Serumula.

His shop is built onto a corner of his house and is run by his
sons and daughters and other helpers from the neighborhood. On a
good day he takes in up to $400 selling household groceries, fresh
fruit and vegetables, milk, and bread.

Bell's Tuck Shop is one of about 1,000 so-called spaza shops in
Soweto. There are an estimated 20,000 such stores attached to
residents' homes in the townships around Johannesburg and Pretoria.

They have taken over as the main business form in black
townships, in which commercial activity was forbidden for decades by
apartheid laws bent on ensuring that blacks would continue to regard
the impoverished tribal homelands as their true homes.

When black stores were first allowed, they were limited to only a
few. In recent years, white capital has built hypermarkets and huge
shopping centers on the outskirts of Soweto in hope of attracting
black trade.

But most black families prefer to supply their daily needs from
the spazas and would rather travel to Johannesburg to buy clothing
and luxury goods.

Spaza is township slang for "camouflaged" because most of the
stores are run from a garage or backyard and are not immediately
visible.

The spaza shops, which have a collective turnover of more than $1
billion nationwide, are one of the most visible manifestations of
the "informal sector or black economy - which has sprung up in and
around black townships.

It has been a silent economic revolution, which has taken place
over the past 15 years or so despite a plethora of regulations -
mostly linked with racial restrictions - on small-business activity.

It had its origins in necessity - black unemployment levels of 35
percent and the growing demand for basic goods and services. Today
some 900,000 blacks are involved in the informal sector.

Official statistics put the informal sector's contribution to the
economy at between 6 and 8 percent.

But economists estimate that its contribution is closer to 25
percent of a gross domestic product of about $60 billion.

The building momentum - aided by lobby groups like the Get Ahead
Foundations, the African Council of Hawkers and Informal Business
(Achib), and the state-backed Small Business Development Corporation
- has chipped away at the array of protections, privileges, and
concessions that once prevented such activity. …